Windows Mobile Device Center Stopped Running in Windows 10

This is article is for users that are no longer able to launch Windows Mobile Device Center / Crashes on open.

There seems to be two things that have happened with the new Creator update for Windows 10. The first issue has to do with the local services account. It seems some permissions have been removed that the Windows Mobile Device Center needs to function. This is a two part fix. The first is that the Windows Mobile Device Center needs to be updated with either a domain or local administrator account to run the service. This can be performed through the log on tab in the service properties. The second is listed below with a nice introduction as to what was broke:

The creators update has a new feature, related to svchost.exe: the services will not share by default the same svchost.exe, even they are assigned to be run within of the same group with -k option. More detailed has been described here.

Rapimgr and Wcescomm (Windows Mobile-based device connectivity and Windows Mobile-2003-based device connectivity) are such services: they are defined to be started in the same shared svchost.exe (-k WindowsMobile). RapiMgr creates a kernel semaphore AS_ACCEPTANCE_SEMA, because it starts first. WcesComm tries to do this too, but fails: the semaphore has been already created and should be only opened. This will fail: not enough permissions (remember: two different svchost.exe, different SID, etc). So, wcescomm is just stopped.

The fix is simply: add SvcHostSplitDisable to the both services RapiMgr and WcesComm: